If you want to know why games are dominated by white, straight, cis male gamers, maybe put a buck or two into actually making sure forums, events and launches aren’t a wankfest of fuckery where anyone who doesn’t fit that description is harrassed, ignored, talked down to, pointed and laughed at or joked about.

Maybe also put a buck or two into actually advertising and promoting games that don’t have protagonists of that description as the lead character. That way you can’t use the excuse of ‘oh, well, games with non straight white cis man character leads don’t sell well’ YEAH HOW ABOUT SPENDING THE SAME AMOUNT OF MONEY ADVERTISING AND PROMOTING GAMES THAT DON’T HAVE GENERIC LEADS AND SEE IF THAT WORKS FOR ONCE?

Give us a fucking equal platform for fucking once and you’ll see you’ll see we’re not a vocal minority. We’re a fucking money-spending majority and we’ll buy your fucking games and make you a shit tonne of money.

I need diverse games because even if you forget about concepts like justice and equality (which you shouldn’t), and even if you ignore the demonstrated concrete consequences of a lack of representation in the media (which you shouldn’t), and even if you ignore the business reality that hetero white men are now the minority of gamers (which you shouldn’t), making every single major game about the exact same guy is just boring.

I need diverse games because I’m exhausted. I’m tired of playing as the same white, cis, hetero, stubbly, 30-something man. I’m tired of his dead/kidnapped wife and/or daughter. I’m tired of his dark past and his stoic man pain, which somehow both requires tiresome reticence and a refusal to grow as a character, but also justifies relentless rage and remorseless murder. The same non-diverse developers lead to the same non-diverse protagonists, which lead to the same stories, over and over again. I need diverse games because diversity is interesting, and new perspectives lead to new experiences. I need diverse games because I’m tired of playing the same game. Aren’t you?

I am hopefully going to be posting something about my gamer set up this weekend. I know when I was looking for information on a good set up for amputees it was really quite hard to find any decent information. So I want to spend a bit of tip on this to make sure it’s really helpful. I know I will do a text/image based thing but I may make a video to go with it if I’m clever enough.

Hey, can you explain gamergate to me. I've tried looking it up and watching videos about it but im still so confused. Which side is #gamergate?

Well, there’s two different fights being fought, really, so it’s kind of hard for an outsider to tell.

People who are for GamerGate are gamers–of varying races and genders–who got annoyed with obvious corruption in gaming journalism. Reviewers give good reviews to their friends without proper disclosure of bias, reviewers give good reviews to game producers who are giving them advertisements, etc. That doesn’t sound very honest or ethical, does it? It’s practically lying about the quality of a video game in order to trick people into buying a game they might not like. The entire point of critics and reviewers it to prevent people from wasting their money on games they wouldn’t like.

I mean look at this shit. Do you think that that is going to be an honest, objective, and bias-free article?

Unfortunately for us(I say “us” because I side with GamerGate. Consider that the disclosure of my bias.), when unethical practices such as those were called out, which is where “#GamerGate” originally came from, the corrupt journalists went and hid behind radfems to protect their unethical practices, which were making them money. Well, actually, it’s more like the journalists ran to radical feminists and said “Look over there! It’s misogyny!” in order to slip away in the confusion of gamers being torn apart by angry radfems.

To do this, they started writing a bunch of BS articles about so-called misogyny in the ranks of gamers, calling us all racist, sexist straight white males so that con-artists and radfems like Anita and Brianna Wu could have ammunition to throw at us.

People like Anita and Brianna then started creating their own ammunition by false-flagging(AKA sending threatening messages to themselves) to make it look like GamerGaters with harassing them because they’re women trying to call out the “misogyny” and that GamerGate is a movement made by men in order to remove women from gaming.

Are there racist, sexist assholes in GamerGate that really do want to kick women out of gaming and really are harassing these people? Probably. It would be ignorant of me to assume that everyone in my movement is a perfect little angel who holds no prejudices, but those assholes are certainly the minority, and that’s not what the movement is supposed to be about. Most of us would never even think of sending threats, even if only because it makes us look bad in the public eye. Most of us just want to stop being lied to about the quality of certain video games and stop having race and gender politics forced into our hobby.

Are GamerGaters primarily white, straight, and male? Of course, but that’s only because the majority of gamers are white, straight, and male, and the reason the majority of gamers are white, straight, and male is only because the largest demographic of people in the Western world are white and straight. So it makes sense that most gamers are white, straight, or male, but that doesn’t mean that we’re trying to push out the gamers who aren’t white, straight, or male. I have a lot of female friends who play video games. Hell, at least one of them I made into a gamer myself by showing her Mass Effect. If I, as a supporter of GamerGate, wanted women to stop playing video games, I would not have encouraged my best friend, who is female and also an LGBT individual, to try Mass Effect. That’s also where #GamerGate’s other hashtag, “#NotYourShield” comes in to play. The Anti-GamerGate crowd was/is trying to use gamer minorities like blacks, asians, LGBTs, and women as ‘shields’ so that anyone criticizing their smokescreen/witchhunt could be more easily called racist, sexist, or homophobic. Gamers who weren’t white, straight, and male decided that if they were going to be used as shields in this big mess, they’d rather shield their straight white male gamer friends than some lying radfems, and they do so by posting pictures of themselves showing that not all members of GamerGate are straight white males.

Although, if your argument for why a movement is evil is that it’s populated with straight white males, that’s pretty fucked up and prejudiced, at least in my opinion.

Should video game developers include more minority main characters in their games? To tell you the truth, I don’t care about representation. I think that developers should be allowed to create whatever characters of whatever color, gender, or sexuality they want, and that that goes both ways. If a developer wants to make a main character with fair skin, more power to them. If a developer wants to make a main character with brown skin or yellow skin, they should go for it. Straight/cis character? Fine. LGBT character? Fine. Male character? Cool. Female character? Also cool. I don’t take the race, gender, or sexuality of the character into consideration when I’m deciding whether or not to buy a game. I care more about the gameplay and the story, and I feel like that’s how it should be no matter what you are. I also sometimes choose to play as a female character in games that give the player that option.

What about how female characters are often over-sexualized? I hate that. I hate chainmaille bikinis and I hate boob-plate armor, and I hate the idea of wearing stilettos into battle. But that comes partially from the fact that I really like realistic video games, particularly realistic and historically accurate Medieval-set video games because I’m a major Medieval history nerd who reblogs pictures of real swords and real armor all the time. If a game is trying to go for a very realistic feel, but it has a half-naked female warrior right next to a fully covered and protected male warrior, that’s stupid an obnoxious. I try to mod out that kind of stuff when I can. However, if a game is sort of goofy and is going for a silly, quirky, or even cartoonish feel, I don’t really mind it as much. I still hate boob-plates because they don’t makes sense and would only serve to make blows against the female warrior hurt more because of the shape, but I can forgive it, especially if the handsomeness of the male characters is played up too. Seeing Quiet in a bikini top right next to Naked Snake(AKA BIg Boss) in a skin-tight suit that shows off his abs and ass doesn’t bother me at all. Also, on this note, physical fitness will always be sexy, and most games wouldn’t make sense if their main character wasn’t physically fit. Lara Croft couldn’t scale cliffs or jump across huge chasms if she weren’t skinny, and Naked Snake couldn’t Judo-slam people if he didn’t have muscles, abs, and an ass of steel. Super Mario is more cartoonish and jovial, though, so I don’t care that a fat Italian plumber can jump three times his own height. It’s a game that’s deliberately trying not to be realistic.

In conclusion: The media will try to tell you that we’re just a bunch of KKK-loving misogynists who want women to get out of the matchmaking lobby and back in the kitchen, but that’s only because corrupt gaming journalists are part of the media, and they’re trying to cover their own asses. They have something to hide, so they’re trying to fabricate a big distraction so they can get away with their unethical practices. Unfortunately, it seems to be working..

4. My own personal experience supporting the GamerGate movement: I haven’t really met anybody in GamerGate who came off as racist or sexist to me, and the few times I witnessed shitty behavior such as fabricating evidence or blatant prejudice, those people were called out by other GamerGaters before I even heard about what happened. For example, some people were calling Brianna Wu a man a while back(she’s a transitioned transgender), and immediately other GamerGate members told those people off, and every time somebody photoshops a tweet by Anita, other GamerGaters are quick to point out the lie. We police our own ranks and we don’t tolerate real lying, racism, or sexism.

Society at large sees video games as nothing but the domain of mountain dew guzzling, cheetos dust smearing troglodytes. But how accurate is this view?

The vast majority of people who play video games are by and large, decent human beings with lives, jobs, and interests beyond video games. Video games, like books and movies, are simply a pastime–a hobby.

We can’t let a small vocal minority of self-described ‘gamers’ and gamer 'activists’ define the scene for the rest of us, especially when video games are poised to attain mainstream acceptance simply because they wish to hold us back.

It’s my view that games will one day become as accepted in the mainstream as films and books are, without the stigma of having a negative 'gamer culture’ associated with it. But for that to happen, we have to shape the culture around us into the reality we wish for it to be.

Tim Schafer just now at GDC2015 went on stage and said that no female or minorities exists as gamers and those who claim to be so are sock puppets and finds it hilarious that sock puppets are try hards.

I have never been so offended in my entire life. Here we have a privileged white man saying that minorities and women don’t game and then people wonder why people have it hard. Because of people like him.